Tier 1 · Gated foundation
Foundations for Analysts
A seven-week intensive that builds the analyst's craft — Excel, SQL and statistical literacy as working tools — and the orientation DAT 200 assumes from day one.
- Duration
- 7 weeks
- Tier
- Tier 1 · Foundations
- Certificate
- WIATech Certificate in Foundations for Analysts
Engineers build systems; scientists build models; analysts answer questions. DAT 45 builds the orientation to the analyst's craft — what data analytics is as a profession, how analysts work, fluency in the analyst's daily tools (Excel, SQL, and Python at light analyst depth), and statistical literacy at the right level. By the end, a graduate can take a vague business question, translate it into an analytical workflow, retrieve and clean the data, produce a defensible answer with appropriate caveats, and communicate it to a non-analyst stakeholder.
§ What you'll be able to do
- Articulate what data analytics is as a profession, and what it isn't
- Refine a vague business question into a precise analytical specification
- Use Excel fluently for analyst-style work — pivots, lookups, conditional logic, cleanup
- Use SQL as an analyst — query patterns, iterative building, the SQL-to-Excel handoff
- Describe data statistically at literacy level — central tendency, dispersion, distribution shape
- Recognise common statistical mistakes in published analyses and their own work
- Complete an end-to-end analytical project, from vague question to executive summary
- Communicate findings to non-analysts with honesty about uncertainty, and defend the choices
§ What you'll cover
The Analyst's Craft
What analysts actually do, where they sit in organisations, and how their craft differs from adjacent professions.
Excel as the Analyst's Daily Tool
The largest module: Excel as a data tool — functions, lookups, pivot tables and charts that communicate.
SQL for Analysts
SQL through the analyst's eyes — query patterns, iterative building, and the SQL-to-Excel handoff.
Statistical Literacy for Analysts
Enough statistics to describe data honestly, recognise real signal, and avoid misleading analysis.
Python for Analysts at Literacy Level
What Python and Pandas do for analysts specifically, and when each tool is the right reach.
The Analytical Project — End to End
Wiring craft, Excel, SQL, statistics and Python into the complete analytical workflow and the capstone.
Capstone
The Complete Analytical Project
An end-to-end analytical project on a real West African scenario — from a refined question through analysis across Excel, SQL and/or Python to an executive summary and technical appendix, defended in an oral conversation.
§ Tools you'll use
- Microsoft Excel
- PostgreSQL with psql
- Python 3.12+ with Pandas (at literacy level)
- Jupyter Notebook
- Git
§ Where it leads
Required by DAT 200, doing double duty as orientation-to-profession and gap-closing. Every DAT 200 Semester 01 module has a corresponding DAT 45 module that gets the student to the diploma's starting line.